7 items tagged “creativecommons”

Flickr Shapefiles Public Dataset 1.0. Another awesome Geo dataset from the Yahoo! stable—this time it’s Flickr releasing shapefiles (geometrical shapes) for hundreds of thousands of places around the world, under the CC0 license which makes them essentially public domain. The shapes themselves have been crowdsourced from geocoded photos uploaded to Flickr, where users can “correct” the textual location assigned to each photo. Combine this with the GeoPlanet WOE data and you get a huge, free dataset describing the human geography of the world. #22nd May 2009, 6:12 pm

Yahoo! Geo: Announcing GeoPlanet Data. The Yahoo! WhereOnEarth geographic data set is fantastic, but I’ve always felt slightly uncomfortable about building applications against it in case the API went away. That’s not an issue any more—the entire dataset is now available to download and use under a Creative Commons Attribution license. It’s not entirely clear what the attribution requirements are—do you have to put “data from GeoPlanet” on every page or can you get away with just tucking the attribution away in an “about this site” page? UPDATE: The data doesn’t include latitude/longitude or bounding boxes, which severely reduces its utility. #20th May 2009, 9:12 pm

Map Maker for Developers. Tiles from Google’s Map Maker crowdsourcing effort are now available in the JS and static maps APIs on an opt-in basis. Maybe I’m misunderstanding something here, but Google Map Maker seems like a big step backwards for open geographic data. People donate their mapping efforts to Google, who keep them—unlike OpenStreetMap, where the donated efforts are made available under a Creative Commons license. #21st February 2009, 9:05 am

ficlets memorial. Here’s a great argument for Creative Commons—AOL shut down Ficlets without providing an archive or export tool, but the license meant Ficlets co-creator Kevin Lawver could scrape and preserve all of the content anyway. #14th January 2009, 10:02 pm

License Hacking. Wikipedia is making the switch to a CC license, by asking the Free Software Foundation to include that as an option in the latest version of the Free Documentation License which Wikipedia currently uses and which includes an auto-upgrade clause. Devious. #10th November 2008, 10:46 pm